The Cartel (30 page)

He loves Flor.

But the Zetas are still very much a part of his new life.

They’re part of everybody’s.

As Chuy moves around the city, he sees their gunmen on the street, sees them go into the bars and the clubs, into the brothels and the
tienditas
—the little stores—and he sees that they collect protection money from everyone.

The Zetas run Michoacán.

“Didn’t you know that?” Flor asks him one night.

“I thought they were just narcos,” Chuy says.

“They run everything now,” she says. “It was them who took me off the train, brought me here, put me to work. The money I make goes to them. All the girls pay them or they beat you, maybe kill you.”

She knows girls who have just disappeared.

The Zetas rule Michoacán like a colony.

So as Chuy works, he literally keeps his head down. As he goes in the truck all around the city, even out to the little villages in the countryside where La Familia delivers food and clean water, digs wells, and builds daycare centers, he keeps an eye out for Zetas.

If they recognize him, he knows they’ll kill him.

And not quick.

But other than that, life is good. He likes living at the house with his new friends, likes spending his spare time with Flor, even finds he likes going to church, singing the hymns, hearing Nazario preach.

One of Nazario’s sayings is, “You are only as sick as your secrets,” and Flor urges Chuy to go speak to one of the counselors, the man who brought her into La Familia, to do a “cleansing,” because it’s wonderful and he will feel better.

“I feel okay,” he says.

“You have nightmares,” Flor says. “You wake up weeping. If you do the cleansing, the nightmares will stop. Mine did.”

A few nights later, Chuy does his cleansing. He goes into a small room with the “counselor,” a man in his forties named Hugo Salazar.

“Tell me your sins,” Hugo says. “Get them off your soul.”

Chuy balks, says nothing.

Hugo says, “ ‘You cannot climb a mountain with a sack of garbage on your back.’ ”

“I’ve done bad things.”

“God already knows everything you’ve done and everything you will do,” Hugo says, “and He loves you, anyway. This is not a confession, it’s a liberation. Nightmares can’t live in the light.”

“I’ve killed people.”

“You look like just a boy.”

Chuy shrugs.

“How many people?” Hugo asks.

“Six?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m pretty sure six.”

“Were they innocent people?” Hugo asks. “Women? Children?”

“No.”

“How did you come to kill?” the man asks.

“I worked for narcos.”

“I see,” Hugo says. “Anything else?”

Chuy wants to tell him about his nightmare, what he did with Ochoa that night, but he’s too ashamed, and afraid. The Zetas might be looking for him, and if he tells, he might be identified, because only Zetas do that kind of thing.

“Yes,” Chuy says. He stares at the floor. “I killed my best friend.”

“Why, my young brother?”

“He was going to kill me.”

Hugo lays a hand on his shoulder. “Nazario says that this world is full of evil, which is why we must not be fully part of this world, but always have an eye on the next one. In an evil world, sometimes we have to do evil to survive, and God understands this. The point is that we try to do the right thing, with a pure heart. Go back now, my brother, and do what’s right.”

Chuy leaves and finds Flor on the street.

“Was it wonderful?” she asks, beaming at him. “I’m so happy you did it.”

It was good, Chuy thinks.

He does feel lighter.

The nightmares still come, but less often, and he knows the reason that he still has them is because he didn’t cleanse what he did with Ochoa that night. Maybe someday, he thinks, I’ll have the courage to say.

Three days after his cleansing, Hugo approaches him.

“We have a new job for you, little brother.”

The Family needs warriors.

—

Because La Familia Michoacana traffics drugs.

Nazario is the
chaca,
the boss.

But under the Zetas. Just as the Zetas run Michoacán, La Familia is also under their thumb. But the Family has its own trafficking business, mostly in meth, and it’s bringing in vast amounts of money.

La Familia pays a tax to the Zetas, so are allowed to exist. Nazario was good friends with Osiel Contreras, who sent his Zetas to train Nazario’s gunmen. Then the Zetas took over.

Chuy don’t like the idea of working for Forty again, even indirectly, and he tells Hugo that the Zetas are evil.

“In an evil world,” Hugo tells him, “you have to do evil to do good. The drugs we send to America pay for the food for orphans, the water for the villagers. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“God needs warriors in this world,” Hugo says. “You’ve read the Bible.”

Chuy hasn’t but doesn’t say so.

Hugo says, “David was a great warrior. He killed Goliath. The Family needs Davids. Like you.”

Chuy looks at him, puzzled.

“Don’t you see, my brother?” Hugo asks. “All those bad things in your past, those things you were ashamed of, God takes and turns into good. When you fight for Nazario, you fight for the Lord. Your soul shines like the armor of a knight.”

“But I’d be fighting for the Zetas,” Chuy argues.

“The will of God is a mystery,” Hugo answers, “that we humans can’t always solve. Nor should we. We should only listen to His voice, and if you listen, Pedro, you will hear Him calling you.”

Chuy hears the call.

He becomes a warrior of God.

Every night they meet for Bible study or to discuss the Book. They don’t work on Sundays—instead they attend a massive outdoor service at which Nazario preaches.

“Every man needs a cause!” the leader bellows. “A cause, an adventure, and a good woman to rescue!”

His disciples cheer, then sing a hymn.

After the service there’s a large dinner and then silent time—they spend four hours in quiet, contemplating their souls, their mission, the meaning of their lives, the sayings of Nazario. Sunday evenings they meet in the hall and chant the sayings over and over.

They watch videos, listen to tapes, and learn the strict rules—no smoking, no drinking, no drugs. A first offense will earn a beating, a second brings a severe whipping, a third means execution.

Three strikes and you’re
out.

One day the leaders bring Chuy a man they snatched off the streets—a child molester, the worst of the worst—and order Chuy to kill him.

No problem.

A warrior of the Lord, he strangles the man with his hands.

Now Chuy has a different job.

Now he doesn’t deliver groceries.

His five-man cell patrols three city blocks. They watch who comes and goes, report anyone suspicious to their superiors, keep things tight, clean, and orderly. They deliver protection money to the local Zeta boss, who hangs out with his underlings in the office of a local auto body shop.

Instead of boxes, Chuy carries a Glock. He gets a salary. It’s not much, but enough to rent a small room where he moves in Flor. They buy a bed at a junkyard, find a little table at the dump, get a lamp from a secondhand store. And Chuy has a different status—as a warrior, he has respect that earns him a right to make a request.

“I want to take Flor off the streets,” he tells Hugo. “Let her work as a waitress.”

“She isn’t your wife,” Hugo answers.

“She’s going to be the mother of my child,” Chuy answers. Flor told him, shyly and not without fear, that she had missed two periods.

Part of him was scared, part of him was thrilled. He took her in his arms and held her gently. “It will be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I will,” Chuy promised. “I’ll take good care of you both.”

Now Hugo argues, “That child could be anyone’s, little brother.”

“Flor is my woman, so it’s my child,” Chuy answers.

That simple.

“I’ll have to ask,” Hugo says.

“The Zeta boss?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ask,” Chuy says. “
Tell
him that the mother of a warrior’s child can’t be a whore.”

—

The Zeta boss’s answer comes three nights later.

With four other Zetas, he walks into the restaurant after closing, when Flor is wiping down the tables and setting up for the morning.

“Everyone out,” he orders, then looks at Flor. “You stay.”

The others quickly walk out, their eyes on the floor. One of them, a former whore herself, runs to find Pedro.

“Are you Flor?” the boss asks.

Terrified, Flor nods.

“Take off that dress.”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“You’re a whore,” he says, “and you’ll do what I tell you. You still owe us money.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Yes, you will. Right now.”

He nods and the four men grab her, strip the dress from her, and pin her onto one of the tables.

—

“Pedro! Pedro!”

Chuy sees the girl running toward him.

“What is it?”

“It’s Flor! Come quick!”

He runs.

—

Chuy lifts Flor’s body off the table and cradles her corpse on his lap. She’s still warm, her skin is still warm.

People say that you could hear Chuy’s howl through the whole
colonia.

They say they can never forget the sound.

—

Chuy stands outside the
yonke,
the auto shop where the Zeta
peces gordos
—the big bosses—hang out.

He hears them laughing inside.

The clink of bottles and glasses.

Well trained, Chuy checks the clip on his
erre.
Then he kicks the door in and sprays the five of them before they can as much as move.

Crouching beside the wounded Zeta
chaca,
Chuy takes the man’s hair in one hand, like Ochoa did with the man that night. He takes out his knife, like the one the Kaibile handed him that night, pulls the boss’s head back so that his neck is taut, and presses the serrated blade against his throat.

He’s lived this over and over again.

More than the times that the boys hurt him, raped him, made him their girl. More than those things, his nightmares are of that night, when they handed him the knife and told him what to do—

—so now he knows and as if in a dream he saws the blade back and forth as the Zeta boss who raped and murdered Flor screams just as the man screamed that night and the blood spurts out in hot jets as Chuy saws through the arteries, and then the boss is quiet, just gurgling as Chuy saws through cartilage and bone like he did that night, and the bone and cartilage and skin pop as he severs the head.

He sets it down and starts in on the other four. Two are already dead. One tries to crawl away, but Chuy grabs his hair and pulls him back. The last man cries and slobbers and begs but Chuy tells him, “Shut up, bitch.”

Chuy is sitting on the floor with the five decapitated bodies when Hugo bursts in. “
Dios mío,
Pedro, what did you do?!”

“My name is Jesús,” Chuy says numbly. Over Hugo’s shoulder he sees Nazario, with several men behind him. “Kill me.”

Hugo pulls his gun, ready to oblige. The fallout from one of theirs killing five of the Zeta overlords will be horrific. If they can at least turn over a corpse…He points the gun at Chuy’s head.

“Stop!” Nazario yells, knocking Hugo’s hand down.

“The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion,” Nazario quotes from scripture, “and a little child shall lead them all.”

He lifts Chuy up.

“It’s time,” Nazario says.

—

Chuy leads five La Familia warriors into the Sol y Sombre disco where a lot of the Zetas party.

The music throbs, the lights strobe.

Chuy fires a burst from his AR into the ceiling.

As the revelers dive to the floor, two of Chuy’s men open a black plastic bag and dump out its contents.

Five human heads roll across the black-and-white-tiled floor.

Chuy reads from a cardboard sheet, “The Family doesn’t kill for money! It doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people! Only those who deserve to die, die! This was divine justice!”

He tosses the sheet down and walks out.

The revolution—the rebellion of La Familia Michoacana to throw the Zetas out of their homeland—starts that night. Nazario writes press releases and takes out advertisements in the major newspapers to the effect that La Familia is not a public menace but just the opposite, a patriotic organization doing what the government cannot or will not do—“cleanse” Michoacán of kidnappers, extortionists, rapists, meth dealers, and foreign oppressors such as the Zetas.

Chuy doesn’t care about any of that.

All he knows now is killing, and it’s all he wants to know.

—

Eddie sees the story about the Sol y Sombre nightclub on the news.

“Nice,” he says to the flunkie playing
Madden
with him. “Beheadings? Like…
beheadings
? I thought that was Muslim shit. Al Qaeda.”

A few days later Eddie hears that the beheadings might have been carried out by the same guy who attacked his nightclub.

“Jesus the Kid.”

The boy changed jerseys, I guess, Eddie thinks.

A midseason trade.

And some of the narcos are saying that the kid is really a
kid,
eleven, twelve years old.

Junior varsity.

Suddenly, Eddie feels old.

Then he gets the word—

—okay, the order—

—to go make nice.

—The word comes down from AB, El Señor, through Diego.

Eddie gets it—the Zetas have fought them to a bloody stalemate in Tamaulipas—tit-for-tat trench warfare that promises nothing but more of the same. So if these La Familia whackadoodles can draw some troops away from Tamaulipas, okay, good.

It doesn’t stop Eddie from arguing. “They’re religious nuts. You know this Nazario’s
aporto
? ‘El Más Loco’—the Craziest.”

“As long as he’s killing Zetas,” Diego says.

“He’s doing that,” Eddie says. “He’s also our biggest competitor in the North American meth market.”